Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
off topic but the local kmart in my area lived up to 2018. My mom even got a mini dv camera from their old stock in 2010-12
Oh…there may still be a few around, IDK.

Where I used to live as a teen, the K-Mart there eventually got turned into a Builder's Square. That was K-Mart's shot at the homebuilding craze in the late 80s-early 90s. They opened a new Super-K farther down the street.

The Builder's Square eventually folded and the old building got sold a few times until Food4Less bought it. It's been Food4Less now for well over 25 years. The Super-K folded after I moved out, some 10 years after or so. I think it's a skill center/development place now.

The two K-Mart's where I live now eventually folded, the second one a couple of years ago. I bought a Wii at one of those stores. :D

I can remember as a teen being able to drop in to K-Mart when I didn't have a lot of money and being able to get a full meal at their cafeterias. They didn't charge much and the food was decent (especially the fries).
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: whiskersld
Started with some Commodore PET machines in elementary school back in the late 70’s. Eventually the schools moved to Apple //e’s sometime in the early 80’s. I used the //e’s a good bit in middle and high school. Got pretty good at writing code on the Apples and did some program design for the school.

At home I went from an Atari 600XL to a Commodore 64 with a 1541 drive. Loved the 64 and stuck with it for a long time until I sold it and purchased an Amiga 500 right before leaving for college. Used it to remote into the school’s network and code for my CS classes, as well as use the pre-WWW internet. Eventually sold it and upgraded to an Amiga 1200.

My first contact with a Mac was in my college’s computer labs. I was an Amiga guy but I found the GUI of the Mac much nicer than Workbench.

When Commodore went under I used the Amiga for a while longer before building a Windows 95 PC. I absolutely hated Windows but the Mac was a bit out of the price range of a new college graduate. I eventually wiped Windows and installed an early version of Linux. Used Linux for a good number of years until I finally bought my first Mac, one of the first Intel iMacs. I’ve been a Mac guy ever since. Now planning on ordering the Mac Studio.
 
You know, looking back over this thread I reckon maybe it’s a good thing progress didn’t stop in the good old days. What do you all think of the build quality of those old machines like the ZX81? I remember them as being plasticky and rather flaky. They were cheap, and it showed. You could get machines with better build quality like a Compaq or a Mac but you’d be paying an arm and a leg.

Today if you pay attention you can buy good build quality for above the average price but not huge markups. I’m thinking of Lenovo and MS Surface in the PC space, and Apple’s build quality has always been good with a few hiccups (looking at you butterfly keyboard). But even giant box-shippers like HP and Dell have better-built premium lines now.

Software as well has come a long way, the many GUI-based operating systems have streamlined down to just Windows and Mac OS, and Linux to a lesser extent. I can’t remember the last time there was significant innovation in a new product in the desktop OS space. Google with Android and Chrome OS has built on existing pieces from Linux and Java, before that it was Be OS? Does anyone remember that?
 
It doesn't come across that way...it comes across (to me) that you're silently laughing at how us oldies got excited when our computers were just "junk" or "janky boxes" with less power than an Apple Watch...how did we even survive, etc, and for that reason I think I'm out.

That's a pretty baseless assumption that sounds more like self-reflection and insecurity. Even if everybody in this whole thread were laughing at you, what difference would their opinion make? I don't assume how people perceive me, I just do whatever I want to.

There was a university online backbone, I think it was called Janet, on which you could search for scientific papers from the computers in the university library, and there were various dial-up services to main computers on which you could do work.

This was an interesting read but also reminded me why libraries are so invaluable and I wish I had more time to visit. For instance, I just happen to have my grandfather's National Geographic collection. It's practically complete and spans the 1930's to about 1980. Pick a book, any book, and open to any page you like. You're bound to learn some new insight about the past that will change the way you look at the world. What's so important about old literature is that it is frozen in time. You never know what you're getting on the internet, but finding contemporaneous print is a giant witness mark to history. Once you see it in black and white on paper that smells like Gerald Ford and polyester, the argument about whether it is "historically accurate" or "apropos" is over.

Every time I share a nugget about history that has to do with advances in technology, the person I'm sharing to acts so surprised that "people were smart back then". My go-to line is "don't forget that the guys that precisely dropped the first (very precisely engineered) nuclear warhead and walked on the moon did so with slide-rules and sextants". THAT puts things in perspective. People 10,000 years ago are no different than us, they just had fewer shoulders to stand on.

Am I aged/wise enough to write my experience?

It's still interesting to me. You gotta admit it is fun to read the things that people bring up that predate our modern era of "a camera in every pocket" though. If we want to know what a G5 PowerMac was like on day 1, we can just look up a YouTube video of the whole damn unboxing! Incredulous reactions and all! These people are bringing experiences that exist only in their memory. I doubt you can find many recordings of circa 1982 people reacting to their first encounter with an IntelliVision with an IntelliVoice.

But your version of "not that long ago" is probably a lifetime to somebody reading this.

Oh man, the trouble I would have gotten into dialing a long-distance number for a bbs?

Remember sharing a modem with your family's ONE phone line? I don't miss it.

I'm a Christian, and lived through the era of the 1980s where the church saw AD&D/D&D as demonic

I don't think they were wrong. Remember how parents protested Rock 'n' Roll because it promoted indecency, promiscuity, and a general collapse of fundamentals? Well...I'd post a picture of what "rockers" are today but it would get removed by mods.

I've met a dozen people that are into the mythological stuff. It isn't the game, it's the intrigue into "mysticism" that's apparently damaging. I know a family that just loves anything to do with dragons and elves and crap and they're the weirdest most unhinged group I've ever witnessed. Do I think the parents became weirdo's because of The Hobbit? No. But submerging their kids in that stuff plus the whole Gaia space uterus thing is borderline abuse. They have very fuzzy discernment with the lines of reality. I'm not saying it to be insulting or hyperbolic, I mean their kids aren't on the same plane of existence that you and I inhabit. What does it mean if your 16-year-old is whispering to crystals and imitating Naruto?

My first computer was a Compaq "Portable" and I think that I spent close to 2K
for that beast. NEVER moved it.

You're not even going to tell us what you needed that much computing prowess for?

I was 29 and most intrigued in 1982 with word processors I first saw in the USNavy. Just prior to this I knew people who were building their own home PCs, but that was too much work. :)

I will not deny that I disagree with the modern trend of amalgamating everything. I don't know if or when they stopped marketing word processors, but sometimes it wouldn't be a bad thing to have as an individual dedicated device.

Man, I feel like it wasn't that long ago that OfficeDepot was still offering electric typewriters that would allow you to do all of the processing on a 3-line screen before hitting "print" and letting it type everything out for you, formatted and spell-checked.

I don't like that my other devices are doing more things and serving their original purpose more poorly. Remember when TV's didn't have to "boot", or didn't crash, or didn't need software updates, or didn't have to be switched from the "splash screen" to the tuner? In my day, a TV resumed where you left off, no question about it. If I was in the middle of a movie, the tape was cued where I left off as well with no need for loading or signing back in. If you got a Nintendo on Christmas morning, you didn't spend the whole day waiting for a 16gb download just to initialize the console, not to mention the 40gb download PER GAME because the developers rely on patches to clean up after their lazy mess.

Why do I have a mid-Fi stack? Because each device does its job. It does it well and doesn't make excuses. When I want to play a cassette or record, I press play and switch the receiver to the appropriate input with the press of one (physical mechanical, not tactile) button. The VCR is ready any time you need it and there will never be an update that removes a function or says "we've moved your most used features. Click here to learn more". There will also NEVER be some purple-haired cry-baby editing or censoring MY content. Donald Trump will always point McCauley in the right direction no matter how many social media sites want to bring it down because as yet they can't touch my LaserDisc of Home Alone II: Lost in New York. Oh! And the ONLY way you can see The Matrix without the eye-gouging green color grading (meaning, see it in theatrical form) is if you have the FIRST production run physical media. Rare to find, but if you have it nobody can take it from you or block access to it.

I reckon maybe it’s a good thing progress didn’t stop in the good old days. What do you all think of the build quality of those old machines like the ZX81? I remember them as being plasticky and rather flaky.

That's what I mean by junk boxes. As much as people may love their 1980's Trans Am, there is no way a sincere person can deny that they ALL rattle, squeak, creak, groan, tap, and make sounds like spilling silverware. I mean to say, they sounded like that BRAND NEW. It's not a product of its age, it's the fact that the 70's and 80's were a time of EXTREME changes. Synthetic plastics were a new domain that none had mastered. The level of refinement for what was essentially enterprise or hobbyist equipment was...actually pretty much just below what today's enterprise and commercial equipment is. How do you like those automatic soap dispensers in your public restrooms? I mean...when they work ;)

You had environmentalism, polymer and synthetics technology, computer aided design and testing, foreign competition (thank god), liability, safety regulations, and socio-economical BOOMS all colliding. There was no time to figure anything out because the industry you pioneered and commanded today would be spoiled goods by tomorrow's paper.

I could write a mountain of pages on the EPA's moving emissions target and it's effect on motor vehicles from the 70's to the 2000's alone. When you look at vehicles from the era, you could tell they were fixing the plane while flying it and at times just flapping their arms. We barely recovered as late as about 2012.

Combining computers and vehicles, look at what something as simple as computer drafting has done for everyday industrial design. I think it would be practically unfathomable to have replicated Apple's Espresso design language without computer design. Compound curves are an order of magnitude more complex than simple gradual curves or radii. Every time I see a compound curve in an appliance, device, or car I see the wireframe and "pull/push" tools used to realize it. I'm a draftsman by trade, so it's not possible for me to look at a mass-produced item without seeing the procedure that made it. To be clear, I started drafting for my own purposes using pencil and paper and a drafting board because I couldn't afford a computer and practical CAD software at that time, so I understand both perspectives. I don't think people grasp how young the luxury of frivolous compound curves is in industrial design, but it has changed the world and really wasn't possible not very long ago. Just like blue LED's, you can never appreciate what seems so "obvious".

Good luck making THIS with your French Curve
93113331000119.jpg
 
I don't think they were wrong. Remember how parents protested Rock 'n' Roll because it promoted indecency, promiscuity, and a general collapse of fundamentals? Well...I'd post a picture of what "rockers" are today but it would get removed by mods.

I've met a dozen people that are into the mythological stuff. It isn't the game, it's the intrigue into "mysticism" that's apparently damaging. I know a family that just loves anything to do with dragons and elves and crap and they're the weirdest most unhinged group I've ever witnessed. Do I think the parents became weirdo's because of The Hobbit? No. But submerging their kids in that stuff plus the whole Gaia space uterus thing is borderline abuse. They have very fuzzy discernment with the lines of reality. I'm not saying it to be insulting or hyperbolic, I mean their kids aren't on the same plane of existence that you and I inhabit. What does it mean if your 16-year-old is whispering to crystals and imitating Naruto?
I reiterate what I said above. I am a Christian.

My wife and my children are also Christians. Nothing in what you said is attributable to me or my family.

I play games; tabletop RPGs, or on the computer. I use discernment in my choices. That's all.

Since this is getting us way off track, I'm going to mention Eye of the Beholder, (I, II and III) which were games by TSR/SSI that I played on the computer during the time period of this topic. All of those were DOS-based.

I also got Myst in 1993, which forced a purchase of a CD-ROM drive and a Sound Blaster AWE-32. That was fun.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: BigMcGuire
Oh I'm not pointing fingers at anybody or even making any assumptions. There is plenty that was protested when I was a naive kid, and I thought they were harmless. Now I'm glad I see their point. Not farfetched to see Harry Potter and Dragons as harmful to kids, even if we all grow up well-adjusted.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: millerj123
I don't think they were wrong. Remember how parents protested Rock 'n' Roll because it promoted indecency, promiscuity, and a general collapse of fundamentals? Well...I'd post a picture of what "rockers" are today but it would get removed by mods.

I've met a dozen people that are into the mythological stuff. It isn't the game, it's the intrigue into "mysticism" that's apparently damaging. I know a family that just loves anything to do with dragons and elves and crap and they're the weirdest most unhinged group I've ever witnessed. Do I think the parents became weirdo's because of The Hobbit? No. But submerging their kids in that stuff plus the whole Gaia space uterus thing is borderline abuse. They have very fuzzy discernment with the lines of reality. I'm not saying it to be insulting or hyperbolic, I mean their kids aren't on the same plane of existence that you and I inhabit. What does it mean if your 16-year-old is whispering to crystals and imitating Naruto?

To be fair, i think thats down much more to the modern New Age than to table-top RPGs. The reactionism at the time to AD&D came mostly from some poorly conceived ideas in the game’s Monster Manual which featured categories of creatures named Demons and Devils. This was later changed to some made-up names, but as far as Christian fundamentalist commentators were concerned the damage was already done.

In this part of the world too you currently see otherwise-reasonable people who follow for example what Christina von Dreien or other so called mediums say about the existence of extraterrestrials. You can go a long way down that rabbit hole, there exist whole cosmologies and alternate histories that are far more complex than what most science fiction writers invent.

We all have the job of freeing ourselves from our own preconceptions and imagined beliefs to arrive at something like a clear, well-balanced view of the world.
 
Since this is getting us this way off track, I'm going to mention Eye of the Beholder, (I, II and III) which were games by TSR/SSI that I played on the computer during the time period of this topic. All of those were DOS-based.

I also got Myst in 1993, which forced a purchase of a CD-ROM drive and a Sound Blaster AWE-32. That was fun.

Eye of the Beholder, yes, released in 1991 while I was at uni, I could play it on my stepfather’s PC. But that was a flick-scroller if I remember rightly. Do you remember the original Dungeon Master back in 1987? What really impressed me while I was at uni were Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, some of the first very primitive real 3D games which had a properly realised world you could explore.

I also remember being tremendously attracted by Neverwinter Nights, around 1998, a game that promised to bring the table-top experience to computer RPGs. It sadly fell short of that, the toolset was too complex for most people to enjoy creating with, and the game itself wasn’t that great compared to other D&D games such as Baldur’s Gate.

But one of the programs — not a game — that I really enjoyed on the Macintosh and which I also used professionally was KPT Bryce. That kicked off an enduring fascination with procedural textures and geometry, and it had a pretty competent renderer as well. You could make some beautiful art with that, if you knew how to fiddle the settings of the generators.
 
  • Like
Reactions: eyoungren
The old times:

1. The invention of standard of Ethernet in 1984!
2. The first GUI Mac sold
3. The Arpanet became the Internet
4. MTV actually played good music videos making some songs hits!
5. Writers actually sang their own songs
6. When printer ink became so valuable to higher than gold!
7. In the 1970s when companies decided they could make more money by producing overseas!
 
The old times:

4. MTV actually played good music videos making some songs hits!
LOL! Yeah, during those years we didn't have cable. My dad refused to pay for it. By the time I started paying for it (because I had a job and wanted it) MTV had become largely irrelevant.

My teen years were sad culturally in that regard. I lived rural, so no access to a mall each day to hang out with friends. And for music, all I had was the radio or whenever Friday night videos might be on.
 
Last edited:
LOL! Yeah, during those years we didn't have cable. My dad refused to pay for it. By the time, I started paying for it (because I had a job and wanted it) MTV had become largely irrelevant.

My teen years were sad culturally in that regard. I lived rural, so no access to a mall each day to hang out with friends. And for music, all I had was the radio or whenever Friday night videos might be on.

Luckily I ways had cable because a cable guy start his own cable in mid 70s min my small town! He ran it well and at his retirement he was bought out for 5 Million Dollars! He then moved to Florida for retirement because of weather!
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: eyoungren
What was it like to use your Mac back in the day?

I remember using my first computer in 1995. It was a Packard Bell and was the first time I ever saw a GUI. I played around in drawing apps and kid's games. I also learned to type. I believe I used an Apple IIGS in elementary school.

When I look at the computers that were "sensational" before then and cost multi-thousands of dollars, I have to wonder why. I can't quite comprehend the need for performance before the introduction of digital video and audio or the media-rich internet.

In the entire history of the world, time and making things easier are the primary reasons for inventions and progress.

My first computer was a DEC PDP-8E at my high school in 1975. You wanna talk slow? Try waiting for a printout with a 110 baud (that's ten, TEN! characters a second) of oh, 2-3k of BASIC code. Even CRT displays of the day were not a lot faster.

Back in the 1970s, 80s and before, the primary drive for computer performance was how much faster what we would call trivial tasks today like spreadsheets and word processing (there really was not a lot like e-mail back then) faster and more efficient. Long before we had "desktop" micro computers, there were Word Processing "machines" with a mini computer and CRT display built into a standard office desk.

The faster the machine works, the more work can be done. Not any different from any other industry or task. In ages past, we took our laundry down to the creek to wash, now we pop it in a machine, press a couple buttons, and in an hour have clean clothes, a task which might have taken half a day or more.

In 1985 or 1990, why would you choose to spend so much money on a computer? Why was one option better than the other? Did you really need another 10mhz? Was your life made easier by adding 6mb of RAM? Was there a time when a computer you bought one year made the computer from the prior year hilariously obsolete?

See above. In the early 1990s, the Macintosh IIfx was the fastest 68030 Mac that could be bought. Content creators would fall over one another to get their hands on one, even though they started at $8,969 (up to $10,969), the equivalent to $19,293 today.

The impact of newer processors wasn't always in the raw performance. Performance per dollar was (and still is, despite what some would say) highly important. The 68030 in the IIfx was clocked at 40 Mhz. In 1994, Apple introduced the first PowerPC Macs, the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 & 8100. The top end 8100 in its basic configuration had an 80 Mhz PowerPC 601, and retailed for $4,249 ($8,060 today). The performance difference was enormous, more than what a doubling of the processor speed would indicate.

When I see the PowerPC Apple introductions, everybody is losing their minds over the performance. Did you ever witness a real-world scenario where a PowerMac G3 was really the only solution to your computing needs? Were they really super computers in comparison to the x86 Windows world?

In a lot of ways, yes. One of the big performance drivers has always been Adobe Photoshop. In 2022, lots of cheap or free apps can do what it took Photoshop and a fast (and expensive) Mac to do back then.

As I've experienced a hundred vintage computers, the lines in their capabilities are utterly blurred. I can't imagine how an Intel 286 CPU clocked at 12.5mhz is any more or less practical or necessary than an Apple IIc Plus. It's all clunky kludgy claptrap that reminds me of the early attempts of man to fly.

It all depends on what you wanted or needed to do with it. If you're happy writing letters to people and printing them (slowly) on your dot-matrix printer, than the //c+ would be perfectly fine for you.

Yes, there were a LOT of computers in the 80s and 90s particularly. IBM PC Clones proliferated. Manufacturers sprung up left and right, all using the Intel x86 series of chips and chipsets, so there was a LOT of overlap manufacturer to manufacturer. Dell? Compaq? HP? Packard Bell? They all produced PCs that could do the job, but how do you pick one or the other?

Apple stayed the course with the Motorola chips, then the PowerPC chips, until they had cooling issues with the G5s (sound familiar?) and the Motorola/IBM performance map for the PowerPC wasn't as robust as that of Intel at the time.

Evolution comes in small changes. A few megahertz here, a smaller floppy disk there, etc. It would be impossible to just up and change from selling a Mac SE/30 to dropping the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra in a single bound. All the steps (well, most of them...) in between all contributed in some way to what we have now.

I recall the company I worked for buying their first 1 (One!) Gigabyte Hard Disk Drive. This was a full-height, 5 1/4" form factor (meaning it was as wide as a drive that used 5 1/4" floppy disks) multi-platter affair. Huge built-in power supply, SCSI interface (of course), and we got it when the price went down to $999...

That drive was needed to burn CDs (which was another expensive device), and the software of the day was very finicky about how you burned the CD. First, you needed a single drive partition the size of the CD you were burning (650 MB or thereabout, depending on drive and media), you put all your data on the partition, then you could burn the CD from there. Oh, and might as well go home for the night, or weekend, as between the 1x burn speed, and the speed of the HDD, SCSI connection, and the Mac you were using, it would take hours, and you prayed that the power stayed on in your SoHo office building...

I can imagine if your whole occupation required you to figure out how to make something happen precisely and quickly, but that's so hard to emulate today without the insight from the people that lived it. Just like how kids today may not be able to imagine how Tiger Electronics pocket games were fun, you just had to be there.

Once upon a time, computers occupied rooms, even buildings, and required custom systems to keep them cool and dust-free. The computer power it took to send men to the moon is dwarfed by what I carry on my wrist, much less in my pocket, or sits on my desk.

Many of us old-timers can recall playing STARWR on text terminals, there was a moon landing program you could play on a teletype, so many things you could do back then, even when you only had 8k (yes, K!, no M, no G...) of memory to work in (and only 184k storage on slow tape). efficient code was a must, especially of you were loading it from paper tape!
 
  • Like
Reactions: BigMcGuire
If there's anything to share I have a LOT to talk about as I've gone through a lot interations of computers and tech.

I started computers very young - at the age of 6. My first computer was a Sharp MZ-700 where I used it to learn BASIC. Barely a year later (in 1984) my family replaced that and got me a ZX Spectrum Plus. I first learnt about the Spectrum from one of my uncles who I saw played Dambusters on it with a friend when I visited his home.

Anyways my dad at the time also got himself a BBC B Micro with a Taxan Kaga dot-matrix printer. He used a version of the Sage software to do invoicing for his work (which was very forward-thinking thing to do at the time). Aside from that he'd bought a low 1200 baud Hayes modem then and used it to access the Prestel network which was the UK's version of the BBS in the mid-80s to 90s (and predated the world wide web by nearly a decade). One of the most fun things that ever happened to me was getting freebies from a friend in the IT business. As it happens we had a family friend who worked at Prestel and he was also a computer mag journalist writing for PC World magazine at the time writing product reviews. The fun thing was, whenever he finished the product reviews for any computer item, he would sometimes pass them onto my family to use. As some of the products were never needed to be returned, we got some pretty good freebies from him. The AMX mouse (the first mouse for BBC and way before it arrived on PCs in early 90s), the Robostick and Megabucks for the ZX Spectrum - these were some of the freebies we received. He also did me one special favour and that was lent me out a review Amiga 1000 around July 1985 when it first launched. I put on the Marble Madness that it was shipped with, and was blown away by the sound quality. I used it for 3 months and it was the best thing I ever used. Sadly I wouldn't become an Amiga owner until much much later in 2015 when I finally got hold of an A500 Plus (as well as an Atari 1040STE for my retro collection). As a big Sierra fan, I have a Roland MT32 unit at home dedicated just to use it with these two machines.

From the period since 1989, was very active for me computers wise as I used computers both at home and at school. Also because my dad was a big user himself also, so had equipment upgrades roughly every 6 months to a year back then. Some of the systems I had at home during this period included the Atari 520STFM, XT PC, Tandon 286 PC with 20MB Datapac storage drive, generic 386SX PC, Zenith Data Systems 486SX fitted with Aztech CD-ROM and Orchid Soundcard; Escom Pentium PC & Carrera Pentium Pro. With the CD system I had on the Zenith PC, the Aztech was actually my second drive - the first CD-ROM unit I had was made by Philips and it was 1x and the size of a small home hifi CD player! We had to change it as it was running Day of the Tentacle a bit slow (and yes I had the triangle box version!). It was a great game with the talkie version. Incidentally I was at the launch of the UK's CD format by Philips when I attended the hifi show at the Penta hotel at Heathrow in 1983 so I'd seen it rise first hand.

The first time I truly learnt about Macs was when I was hired for work via this journalist family friend to work with someone he knew. That was when I put my skills to the test on a Power Macintosh desktop to learn about building HTML pages. This was around summer of 1995, when the likes of Amazon at the time was relatively unknown and had only just started like a year and a half earlier selling books. It would be the last time I used a Mac until I became a big Mac user myself in my family business and required the use of several Power Mac G4s around 1999 (or 4 years later). Since that time I've gone through a lot of Apple gear anything from the Apple SCSI CDROM and 13" green screen to Powerbook G4s/G5s, Apple Newton & iPod, iMac G4s & G5s to Macbook Airs, iPads, iPhones, Mac Minis to Mac Pros. With my Power Mac G4s, I used custom SCSI RAID drive setups and optical disks including Fujitsu MOs and Iomega Bernoullis & Jaz drives to store the data (because of the volume of files we worked with, which were images). I learnt a lot about digital archiving through that period of exercise. It was interesting times to say the least.
 
The impact of newer processors wasn't always in the raw performance

Now that helps put things into perspective. I can see the value in shopping for CPU's and seeing that one offers, say, 5% more speed for 3% more cost.

Currently I am dealing with a few professionals and entrepreneurs in my personal life that are scoffing at the M1 Mac RAM numbers. They believe More RAM=More speed. I wish they could understand races aren't won on paper but that is business enterprise for you.
There was a time that a car's performance really boiled down to the size of the engine. With large paradigm shifts like forced induction and better efficiency, the old rules no longer apply and a 3.0L supercharged Audi can spank ANY car made before 1985 regardless of what they're packing. I'm talking 8.2L V8's vs the puny V6.

What I'm not getting, though, is what people needed computers for. Not just police and libraries keeping records. I see a lot of responses recalling games and communication. I failed with my original premise as I have only just now realized it's 2022 and that makes anybody that was old enough to be a manager/executive during the 70's and 80's about 80-years-old! My bad.

When I use older systems, they don't usually have any software with them so I'm failing to be able to relate to the era. I mean before graphical and creative work. If somebody handed me a TRS or PET or Commodore I wouldn't know what to do with it except play games and write BASIC. Why would I write code? It can't network to my thermostat and change it throughout the day. It couldn't order a plane ticket or automate anything like tape dubbing if I wanted to pirate music, for instance. As far as I (and don't underestimate my ignorance) can see, computers existed at the time for games, communication, and data (just text) storage and access. I'm not saying that's the truth, I'm saying there's a big hole in my understanding of early computing.

He also did me one special favour and that was lent me out a review Amiga 1000 around July 1985 when it first launched. I put on the Marble Madness that it was shipped with, and was blown away by the sound quality. I used it for 3 months and it was the best thing I ever used

I couldn't imagine having been there to see CD technology unveiled. The world of possibilities must have really opened up at that moment. As a kid in the Packard Bell days, CD's were pretty much the Pinnacle still. Probably the most recent major roll-out I can think of that is turning the world on its head is quadcopter drones. Since drones have been made practical, film-making, photo shoots, investigation and exploration, sports, practically everything around us is evolving rapidly to something unrecognizable even around ten-years ago.

What did you find so amazing about the Amiga besides the gaming capabilities? Was there a killer a-ha feature or something that was so new and innovative it took time to even process what was happening? Been a while since I've seen technology that could do that, sadly.

When I got the first iPhone, I just stared at the screen and touched everything I could for a while rearranging icons, opening and closing apps, and sorting through old emails that would have been easier to do on a desktop. Yes we have all seen and interacted with touch screens for decades (my earliest recollection of encountering a touch screen was a kiosk around 1995), and I had PDA's and a Nintendo DS before. The iPhone, however, was so refined and smooth and seamless that it felt like finally being able to walk without a crutch. With PDA's, interacting was kludgy, not very intuitive, and didn't offer much actual practicality. They were for keeping track of dates, maybe keeping your bank accounts balanced, and an easy to use address book if your phone (home) didn't save more than 3 numbers. The iPhone felt like holding a full-function computer with Safari (real HTML on a phone!) and YouTube! Imagine that; full motion high-quality video on a device in the palm of your hand. For comparison, the iPhone 3G could play video that was better quality than I think any phone was capable of capturing at that time.

Pinch to zoom seemed so stupidly simple it confounds me to this day that it never occurred to me before. It's one of those functions everybody has today but couldn't understand just what it meant to see something on a screen react to your input, by mere touch, as if it were a tangible object. It's the kind of realization you would have if you've spent your whole like unsuccessfully trying to push a door open only for somebody to show you that it's meant to be pulled. Watch the original iPhone ads and that moment that they zoom into the Map was the moment my brain started to work more gooder.

Actually, to better put things into perspective, I think anybody that wasn't there when the first iPhone was announced should watch all of the original ads. It may seem like they're just a normal person using a phone normally, but you need to be aware that the ads were necessary to retrain the world as to how we looked at devices. No amount of words could have shown us what the device was capable of, it had to be illustrated plainly. If not for those educational ads, I would have just assumed an iPhone was just a PDA-meets-phone if I saw somebody using it.

It's boggling to look at those and see that every swipe, tap and pinch was actually mesmerizing and cutting edge. Then came the App store...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Middleman-77
That's what I mean by junk boxes. As much as people may love their 1980's Trans Am, there is no way a sincere person can deny that they ALL rattle, squeak, creak, groan, tap, and make sounds like spilling silverware. I mean to say, they sounded like that BRAND NEW. It's not a product of its age, it's the fact that the 70's and 80's were a time of EXTREME changes. Synthetic plastics were a new domain that none had mastered. The level of refinement for what was essentially enterprise or hobbyist equipment was...actually pretty much just below what today's enterprise and commercial equipment is. How do you like those automatic soap dispensers in your public restrooms? I mean...when they work ;)

You had environmentalism, polymer and synthetics technology, computer aided design and testing, foreign competition (thank god), liability, safety regulations, and socio-economical BOOMS all colliding. There was no time to figure anything out because the industry you pioneered and commanded today would be spoiled goods by tomorrow's paper.

I could write a mountain of pages on the EPA's moving emissions target and it's effect on motor vehicles from the 70's to the 2000's alone. When you look at vehicles from the era, you could tell they were fixing the plane while flying it and at times just flapping their arms. We barely recovered as late as about 2012.

Combining computers and vehicles, look at what something as simple as computer drafting has done for everyday industrial design. I think it would be practically unfathomable to have replicated Apple's Espresso design language without computer design. Compound curves are an order of magnitude more complex than simple gradual curves or radii. Every time I see a compound curve in an appliance, device, or car I see the wireframe and "pull/push" tools used to realize it. I'm a draftsman by trade, so it's not possible for me to look at a mass-produced item without seeing the procedure that made it. To be clear, I started drafting for my own purposes using pencil and paper and a drafting board because I couldn't afford a computer and practical CAD software at that time, so I understand both perspectives. I don't think people grasp how young the luxury of frivolous compound curves is in industrial design, but it has changed the world and really wasn't possible not very long ago. Just like blue LED's, you can never appreciate what seems so "obvious".

Good luck making THIS with your French Curve
Fascinating stuff! I studied design at A-level so I know exactly what you mean. I too had a fascination with how things were made and put together and often had that question when it came to seeing products up front. Which makes me all the more appreciative of the new Mac Studio and the way it is built - the damn thing looks almost seemless. How will it be opened for servicing when it is so tightly packed? You ask me.

That said, when you talked about the compound curves, it reminded me of the early video of how Ed Catmull of Pixar animated the first digital hand in 1972 using one of the first digitising sensors on a model hand in a rig. I'm presuming a similar method was used by the carmakers to make their curved dashboards?


Incidentally in my family's line of work (and talking of digitisers), we were one of the very first few users (in the UK at least) to use Calcomp tablets for digital work around 1992. This was actually way before Wacom was even well known as a brand in the early 00s. My father was a photographic printer by trade (had his own lab) and around 1989 was the first time that colour inkjet printers first came out that year at 240dpi output (HP Paintjet to be exact which cost £2,000). Though it was crude by todays standards of printers, it was an important milestone in photography because for the first time, colour images could be output accurately from a computer system, and could be a viable artistic medium. Fascinated by it all and thinking that was rather important to his business, my father decided to invest quite a bit of money and time into his computer gear onwards. So in 1993 he upgraded to a custom Intel 486DX-66 PC with a-top-of-the-line Eizo T-160i Sony Trinitron monitor, 4MB of RAM, 80MB hard drive, which ran on Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Those monitors could run SVGA at 1024x768 DPI and were expensive at £700 back in early 90s because Eizo only chose the best Trinitron tubes from Sony's inventory to make them. Then 360dpi printers came out from Epson in 1993 (the Stylus Colour EX) he got that. So when Corel Draw and Photoshop 3 came out in 1994 he was ready to do some serious work. Armed with a Heidelberg A3 scanner and a Yamaha 2X SCSI CD-RW (and a new Epson A3 1520, but custom modified to use thicker paper), by 1996, working with a client he earned the UK industry's first ever silver award for a digitally enhanced image. His field of work was so new that he was named a 'Computer Operator' in the award and not as a 'digital retoucher' as is more commonly known these days. And you probably guessed it - he became a pioneer in his field (in his own right).
 
I couldn't imagine having been there to see CD technology unveiled. The world of possibilities must have really opened up at that moment. As a kid in the Packard Bell days, CD's were pretty much the Pinnacle still. Probably the most recent major roll-out I can think of that is turning the world on its head is quadcopter drones. Since drones have been made practical, film-making, photo shoots, investigation and exploration, sports, practically everything around us is evolving rapidly to something unrecognizable even around ten-years ago.

Yes it was a fascinating time for tech. I was even there to see the launch of the DAT, Minidisc and DCC formats years later at those shows in Bristol and London. Minidisc won obviously in 1993, but for a time it was an absolute dream. Do you remember how the Sony DTC-1000 or Luxman KD-117 DAT players looked or sounded at launch in '87? I do. Same goes for the Nakamichi stand I visited at the Penta hotel where Bowers & Wilkins was showing off their RX-202E auto-reverse player around 1985 (one of the first).

What did you find so amazing about the Amiga besides the gaming capabilities? Was there a killer a-ha feature or something that was so new and innovative it took time to even process what was happening? Been a while since I've seen technology that could do that, sadly.

I would say the Amiga was a massive gamechanger even at right at the start because of several reasons.
First it was able to multitask - it could do several things at once where no others couldn't. The IBM PC and Mac formats had barely taken off in 1985. Multitasking wouldn't arrive for Apple until 1987 and for the rest of the PC industry until 1993 when IBM's OS/2 Warp OS had dropped (and in 1995 when Windows 95 arrived for PC). Second was the amount of colours it could produce which was 4096 at 12-bit (and incredibly smooth) vs PC then with EGA at 16 colours (in 1984) - with raytracing capabilities! It was the first system to bring raytracing to the masses (which made it popular with 3D and animation designers). Third was the sound chip set. It was an innovative polymorphic design (4 x 8-bit PCM). For someone like me who had only just come off of a BBC Micro B or ZX Spectrum system based on the Zilog Z80 with all its beeping, command-line interface and blocky graphics, it was a mindblowing experience to say the least (as it sounded real). Also you're talking 1985. In 1985, the original Apple Mac classic with black and white screen had only been out a year earlier. And polymorphic sound didn't arrive for PCs until around 1993 with wavetable soundcards. This unit from Commodore not only had colour output, but more importantly had high quality colour output, graphics and sound and an easy to use GUI interface. It was like experiencing what you'd finally get in 1995 with a Windows 95 system with multimedia output, but only experiencing it ten years earlier. It was a wonder graphics designers and video editors would move to it in droves back then, because after the introduction of the Newtek Video Toaster, high quality MTV-style graphics made for broadcasting were a possibility with the Amiga.
 
Wow. I can understand what you mean about the Amiga with that kind of perspective. It would be like dropping a SNES into the Atari 2600 days. When it comes to CGI on Amiga and effects like Video Toaster, all I need to see is some Babylon 5 clips then say no more. Before that, the 80's were chock full of amazingly ambitious animation like Money for Nothing, which I'll mention again, all rendered on the one and only. If you haven't seen a video series called Mind's Eye from the 90's, it's worth a watch. They are merely spliced together CGI from adverts, 3D models and movies with really excellent music composed for the video. My favorite music is by Jan Hammer in those.

Catmull's experiments are groundbreaking. I imagine if I were to have been there, I would have been speechless once the hand began animating. Seeing the fully shaded and animated faces would have floored me absolutely. Don't watch Futureworld, it isn't worth it hah.

You are correct about dashboards being digitized. I haven't been able to find very good material on the subject of the time, since car development can remain confidential years and years after completion and most of the development material is destroyed right away. I believe the process starts with sketches. Then they define most of the dimensions on paper, usually with life-size renders. The renders are realized in clay. Then, the clay is digitized and can be manipulated, sliced, normalized, perfected and (most importantly) reproduced precisely.

If you look out, you can see a man applying grid tape to a clay dashboard. Later and still more elusive, you can see the the wire-frame model of the dash being manipulated in a computer.

The Making of Ford Taurus & Mercury Sable
 
  • Like
Reactions: Middleman-77
I’m telling you, those DeluxePaint animations and access to HAM mode made possible images that just seemed beyond reality, and you could do it all at home. I remember designing logos and moving them on screen and spinning them, in 3d space! All on a home computer. Imagine the jump from c64 to all of that.
 
What I'm not getting, though, is what people needed computers for. Not just police and libraries keeping records. I see a lot of responses recalling games and communication.
It's the same reason people use them for now - it makes things easier.

Word processing, financial programs, spreadsheets, all stuff that the computer brought into the home. Things that could take hours or days, suddenly were able to get done faster. And you didn't need to keep things in a shoebox or a file cabinet. Everything you needed went on a disk or a hard drive. And you didn't need to be an expert at typing or much else to produce something.
 
What I'm not getting, though, is what people needed computers for. Not just police and libraries keeping records. I see a lot of responses recalling games and communication.

Basically the early computer with word processing software and a printer was a replacement for the typewriter. Anything written that needed to look professional moved onto computers. Writing uni reports, dissertations, books, official letters, articles, journalism, scientific writing, all of that and much more besides was on the computer.

Even before the internet arrived there were a lot of computers that weren’t networked that were used for this. Spreadsheets were in my experience a more specialised use to do with business analysis. The first large spreadsheets I built were for data modelling and business task tracking, and later on I had some for my personal use to do tax calculations, that was basically 2004 and later.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Middleman-77
It's the same reason people use them for now - it makes things easier.

Word processing, financial programs, spreadsheets, all stuff that the computer brought into the home.

That was certainly the case later, but not when I got my Apple ][ in 1978. There were no word processors, financial programs or spreadsheets. Really, there was nothing but a few games that Apple included (still have the tapes, wish I had kept the computer)

apple_tapes.jpg


In fact, there was quite a bit of skepticism about why anybody would need a computer back then. One of the reasons that was often mocked was "organizing your recipes". I learned ALGOL in a CS 101 course as a college freshman in 1967, that was a frustrating experience of keypunching IBM cards and submitting them to the guys in white coats in the computation center to be fed to the Burroughs mainframe. A couple years later they rolled out a timesharing system with teletype terminals around the campus and I taught myself BASIC. By 1976 I had taught myself FORTRAN using teletype terminals to a big IBM Mainframe.

So, when personal computers came along I was just fascinated by the whole concept. Not because I had "productivity" uses - in fact, I wanted to just waste my time learning what they could do and writing my own software. I subscribed to BYTE magazine and couldn't wait for each new issue to arrive!

Getting the Apple ][ was like geek heaven, I was spending just about every free hour writing programs (my girlfriend was SO jealous, she really didn't "get" it and almost left me). But it was just so cool and unique, I never thought I'd be able to have a COMPUTER sitting on my own desk.

Then I remember when Visicalc came along, that looked really cool but I couldn't afford it. So I wrote my own simple spreadsheet in BASIC and even programmed my joystick to select cells to edit. And I put it to use, creating budgets for my job and printing them out. Everyone was very impressed, they had never seen anything like that before.
 
That was certainly the case later, but not when I got my Apple ][ in 1978. There were no word processors, financial programs or spreadsheets. Really, there was nothing but a few games that Apple included (still have the tapes, wish I had kept the computer)
Yeah, I believe that. My first computer was when I was 10 in 1980. I wasn't even aware they existed before that. 1978 would have had me preoccupied with Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Wonder Woman.

My mom brought home an Apple II something in 1982 I think. It wasn't ours, she taught computer science as an elective at school. But I recall not being very impressed. There were no games and the minimal programs included didn't really interest me. At least the TRS-80 we already had could do games.

Part of my early problem with computers is that I assumed what you got was it. It was not until later that I realized that things could be upgraded, peripherals and accessories (and software) bought and so on.

By 1986 I had some sort of primitive word processor for my Commodore 64, which saved me hours in typing up school papers. The ability to delete typing mistakes saved lots of trees itself.

What's funny, is that my wife is five years older than me. Because of what you mention, during that time period, she thought computers would be a fad that was going to pass quickly. Yeah, she's going to be getting her master's degree in 100% online classes starting in April. LOL.

I've had to pull her kicking and screaming into the modern age, but once I can point out how it makes her life easier and explain how to use it she happily goes off and gets things done (while giving me the middle finger). :D

The past two days she's been working two phones and her laptop at the same time. :rolleyes:
 
I remember typing school papers on “paper clip” on the c64. A harrowing experience. I believe there was “Shakespeare” on the Amiga. I was pretty graphics and animation focused, so I could be missing something. The photoshop on the Mac was so impressive for still images, but it had no animation features.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.